Thread: Tony's Workbook

Fragments after watching the movie NightCrawler - Dream Journals - Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views

I did a wbtb last night and was up several times with fragments.. I wrote them all down.. I was watching the nightcrawler movie and most of the dreams were about that.

I read something in one of these threads about how recall naturally waxes and wanes and that encouraged me. Do it every day. I'm doing practices to increase recall

1 awareness. both in my senses and surroundings but also memory checks where i think back to how i got to where i am. when i remember i think of the specific details and visualize them.
2. meditation. I've been meditating for more than a year. Mostly mindfulness stuff. for a while I was up to an hour a day with some guided meditation but now it's like 10-20 minutes every day. Frequently I get antsy and stop before my alarm goes off.
3. I'm taking a day journal along with my night journal. Writing down stories about my day.

One thing I would like to know from the rest of the class is what does your WBTB ritual look like? I don't really have a good one yet. I journal, walk around a bit, maybe take a supplement, read a little of Leberge... Maybe look at my Journal entries for inspiration, then i decide if i want to wild or mild and go to it. What do you do? maybe we can try something a little more formulated to improve our retention. Share with me. What does your WBTB look like?

I felt very sick and crabby last night. I wanted to try some SSILD after a WBTB but ended up being very stuffy and crabby. I ended up just sleeping all night with a brief wake up because my toddler wanted to get in bed with me during the storm. I was half asleep and crabby when i let her in and knew i should have DJ'd but didn't. So no WBTB attempt but on the other hand I did remember a pretty long and vivid dream for the first time in a couple of days which was nice.

My job + Game of thrones Dream..

I am working with Doug, my recruiting rival in a game of thrones landscape. We are outside of winterfell and are looking to fill a specific position. I have a good candidate already but he is looking for more people, specifically the lady of winterfell. We are sitting together in an inn at a wooden table. It's very dark, lit by a few candles. As he makes plans to find the canddidate/sansa stark, I begin to put together all of the mysterious deaths that have taken place over the last couple of months/seasons. These deaths play out in my head like a series of flash backs. I see, NED, ROBB, Caytelin and Bran all slaughtered. I put that together with the fact that we already have the perfect candidate interviewing with the company now and I understand that that he intends to kill sansa and finish wiping out the stark line so he can elevate the boltons to the heirs of winterfell.

I stand up in the inn and draw my sword. Tears are blurring my vision and i say. "it was you! how could you!" He has a dagger up to defend my blow and soon we are rolling round on the floor fighting.

On the upside, I did a pretty good regular journal before bed and got a solid 15 min of meditation in so i'm pretty up on all of my day work.

I have terrible stuffyness. It's been keeping me from getting good sleep. I've been foggy and not doing well on intentions and wbtb activities. My day awareness has suffered as well. That said. I'm still journaling, meditating and have been focusing on doing Frying's dream recall activities. Last night I did the thing where i held still and free associated up to a few different dreams. I'm like half asleep doing it though so i can't be sure i wasn't just making up some of this shit. lol

dreams from last night.
flying saucer attacks the Kroger in NI by my house in the middle of Th. day, not a cloud in the sky. I'm walking in my childhood neighborhood going to the market to buy something or other. It's a bright sunny day and i'm walking through a bright green field on gravel path when i see a small speck way up in the sky. It floats down and becomes a silver old school flying saucer. It hovers over the Kroger. The center hub holds still and the outer ring starts spinning. a come of light emits tfrom the bottom of the ship and covers the grocery story. I feel like "HOLY SHIT" and the grocery store catches on fire. I'm annoyed. I wonder where I'm going to get what I need. I realize that I don't remember what I"m supposed to buy.

Argument with the owner of the skating apparel company when i still have a stuffy nose

alfalfa from the little rascals movie is posting updates to a new version set in mid evil times. He's like a Perez Hilton type figure and I'm taking an online quiz to determine if the new piece of information is coming from him or TMZ. The little rascal is going through a gritty reboot. Alfalfa is going to get hs head chopped off. Spanky is a vengeful king. Buckwheat is the spirit of vengeance. I wonder why I care about this. I have no feelings for the little rascals.

oprah winfrey climbs in a trashcan and rolls down a big green hill in a park. I'm thinking to myself. Ratings must be BAAAD if she's resorting to this!

also..

I'm starting to pintrest.. I've made a board with LD inspiration and i'm pinning images and stories that I want to experience in my dreams. So i can rev up on those WBTB with intention and get that excitement for what i want to do..

Welcome tblanco to the DILD class! That GOT dream sounded really awesome!

It sounds like your day and night work matches your goals nicely. What I've found is that the combination of daytime awareness, particularly trying to stay "tuned in" for as long as possible, combined with dream recall leads to increasingly more "present" and aware dreams, where I feel like "I'm there." Those sorts of dreams are on the border of lucidity, and it just takes some intention combined with good sleep conditions and/or WBTB to result in increasing lucidity. I myself have dabbled in meditation but have not managed to establish a regular practice of sitting meditation. Maintaining that would be a great thing, as it builds mental focus which is needed for a lot of other LD things like WILD, falling asleep after WBTB, etc.

As for your question about WBTB, I'm perhaps not the best person, since I don't WBTB much beyond a quick bathroom break and recalling dreams -- I just don't like being awake at night.
Fogelbise, though, has done fairly regular WBTBs and can report on his regime. For a while I was waking multiple times per night intention in order to recall. And that did indeed result in quite a lot of recall, but I also found it fairly tiring. These days I prefer the water approach (drinking a lot of water before bed and during the night so you need to use the bathroom a few times per night). I think this has several benefits: being well-hydrated means the brain operates well, and it doesn't take any use of intention to notice the wakings. The downside is that if you have some really interesting recall you want to work through it can be hard to stay quiet and focused on it while your bladder is screaming .

I know in theory the recommendation is to stay quiet & dreamy, not to get too stimulated. Everyone is different in this regard, you need to experiment to determine the ideal times and duration for WBTB.

Regarding your #1 goal: the main thing to progress is steady, regular practice. Don't quit! You've had enough LDs to know how awesome they are -- wouldn't you rather that the time passes with your abilities growing every day? When waking life interrupts, keep up the practice, but just dial down the intensity perhaps...but try to keep it above zero.

I recommend establishing some routines that jog your mind back to dreaming. One thing I do is I have a little rhythmic mantra I recite a lot of the time while walking ("I'm lucid....I'm dreaming...I'm walking...I'm breathing...<repeat>". I try to take notice of all location transitions (doors, room to room, etc.).

It's challenging at first, but the more you work on daytime awareness the more you'll catch yourself having "zoned out" and then you just gently "tune back in."

Not many people write about this but I think that daytime awareness work and learning to pay attention while awake actually leads to a stronger connection to the experience of our dreams, and thus better dream recall. They're all intertwined, these practices!

Feel free to use your workbook to record your progress, notes, etc., and of course to ask questions!

Good to see you posting in the "one sentence summary" thread. I try to make that part of my daily morning ritual immediately after getting up from bed (where I've gone over and over the list of dreams multiple times so that I don't forget them) hop on to that thread and get the summaries written. I'll then fill in the details perhaps later by clicking on "copy to DJ" and then fill in the details.

Originally Posted by FryingMan

Good to see you posting in the "one sentence summary" thread. I try to make that part of my daily morning ritual immediately after getting up from bed (where I've gone over and over the list of dreams multiple times so that I don't forget them) hop on to that thread and get the summaries written. I'll then fill in the details perhaps later by clicking on "copy to DJ" and then fill in the details.

I saw that bit of advice on someone else's workbook and am giving it a go. with the gist, it's easy to fill in later. if i focus too much on one dream teh rest slip away.THROW EM ALL IN THE BOAT, better to lose a little detail than the whole fish

Welcome back to lucid dreaming and to the workbooks Tony! I have been away from the forums for several days, my apologies for not chiming in earlier:

One thing I would like to know from the rest of the class is what does your WBTB ritual look like?

I drink enough water to wake naturally, often somewhere between 4.5 and 6 hours. I get up out of bed, sit down and almost always go on my phone and log my dreams so far and also any thoughts about anything I did pre-bed or noticed during the night so far. I will then either read something lucid dreaming related on my phone and/or do a google image search of dreamy images and while browsing them think to myself "If I were dreaming, I would." When I lay back down I either do SSILD or some visualization - sometimes for incubation and sometimes visualizing a dream from the night or recent nights and imagining the "aha" moment. For the longest time I did SSILD almost exclusively with much success but eventually started mixing in the visualization and/or doing some mantras before my SSILD or visualization.

In the middle of my WBTB right now. I left some bones out from dinner that the dogs ate so I need to cook rice for them to eat right now.. I've been doing some writing on my intentions. What I want out of LD and why. I haven't been too strong on my awareness excercises, but when i see that i've been on autopilot in life, i can bring myself back to paying attention in the. The illness I have (strong head congestion) is putting a cloud around my life. But i'm working around that.. I've been thinking around daytime mantras to stay grounded in the moment and stay into lucid dreaming...

"be here now" almost like a chant. makes me think of teh old raam dass book
"if i were dreaming I would." I love that one for sure...

tonight is a strong night to have a LD..

POT/ART Dealer is trying to make his money and avoid the authorites until a final legalization ruling comes through. He has farmland with huge acres of barns that are filled with product and surrealist paintings. On the day the legislation passes he hires stoners to convert these barns into meuseams/amusement park for smokers. We are trying to figure out the logistics of installing AC units in these barns and convert them. The doors are thrown open in a moment of triumph. all of these stinky long haired people are overjoyed running through these pungent rooms that are brightly colored.

there is a nick fury marathon on TV and I"M looking for a david hasslehof 90's era movie called "BOB FURY" in the b/w newspaper TV listings. I'm watching it on TV. He's got an eyepatch and a skin tight blue suit.

I've never successfully done this (but I have thought a few times about waking life physical limitations, like "with my back I'm in no shape to be playing volleyball"), but with your cold perhaps you could try to notice in the dream state that you do not have this cold condition as one way of inducing lucidity.

I only got like another hour of sleep. Was up way early and way too late with the damn dogs. I did successfully SSILD myself into that heavy body trance state for the first time but it didn't get me lucid, or so i know. I woke up with no dreams remembered. I'm excited for tonight because I'm totally at an REM Deficit now!

kid been in school for 7 years, tryning to get hired as some kind of an EMS in the jungle role. I want to disqualify him or taking him too long but I remember my roots

in SFO talking to my neice. Asking how my brother is doing? She tells me he fells bad for not trying to contact me.

Some kind of an action move scene. I can't tell if it's a deliberatley bad parody or just terrible.fat guy is moving very slow dressed like rambo through a series of heavily armed guys in all black like ninjas. in some of the shots it looks like they are trying to throw the guns down or over reacting to simple punches.. i wonder what am i awacthing.

WBTB

Looking in the newspaper for computer programming jobs. Find a good one and think about how strange it is that the newspaper has want ads for this type of ting. Remember i don't know how to program.

I'm running a legal aid service for mythical american creatures. Sasquach comes in and :Im veryexcited to meet him. he's having issues getting his dposit back from hiss landlord. He's a blurry guy.

Been using Fry's trick of one sentence to remember each dream. Realizing i do dream more than i think. I haven't done a wbtb in a few days and will probably do one tonight. I am intending to be more aware and the most i'm getting out of it is occassionally i'll wake up during the day and remember i've been on complete autopilot.

I had great intentions and woke up several times but I was just so sleepy last night. big fail.


falling through dreamscapes. talking to people about the validity of dreams briefly before I'm swept up and falling again.

TWAke up with the weezer song butterfly in my head. I can remember sharing my dream in my dream and talking about people way down who could tell that it was all a dreamy. The dream people are laughing and laughing. They are looking at my body sleeping in a bed and start shaking me up. "hey! he's sleeping!!!" i think..
yesterday I did more work on intention and awareness. I'm trying to remember that a lucid dreamer is just who i am. fake it till you make it. that confidince helps. and it did. last night i had just a tiny second of lucidity!

Wild... brief lucid

laying flat on my back doing breathing with the word "remember". I can feel my hands go heavy and i forget for a second. Soon I am sleeping in a whole new bed. It's a full sized with a black comforter pulled tight. It doesn't tip me off. I go back into my wilding. I enter a dream in the dark on a block in a neighborhood. I do a nose pinch and try to stabilize but the excitement knocks me right back into my body. I try to deild and wake back up in my bed. My kid is sleeping next to me. I thought she was in her bed. She is in her bed. I wake up.

Post W;ld
My Bloomin Onion is being indecent. I'm in the chilli's telling it to cover itself.

Didn't sleep well last night. I've been doing all my day work and keeping up with my journal. Hopefully the REM deficit hits me up this week. One good dream remembered.

dreaming about the internet. if people put their true feelings about the confederate flag, then they become exposed to people that could hurt them. I don't want my friend Anit to get hurt but i think that we should destroy the flag forever. I see another friend deliver a strong opinion against the flag and I'm surprised and a little relieved.
Share

Studying Sageous' wild lessons and making sure to do awareness once an hour. I didn't meditate yesterday and didn't try a wbtb either. the night before i had no sleep so i jsut wanted to catch up and not get fancy.

had a couple of dreams

helping find a SSBB a job. They are building a profile int the system, going through a large facility for improvement/clean up projects. One of them involves cutting up tons of trip fresh cilantro. All of them involve looking for the best Western or help them get ready for work. Wet muddy and brown, cleaning up poop.

---

Had my brother joe in the dream. He had responded to my email like nothin was going on. I was tryng to help him with work and we were going through possible people he could hire. I"m also engaging him in conversation about what's been going on with him in the last year. He's avoiding teh topic like he doesn't want to talk about it.
…

I have been keeping up with my journals and have made a few attempts at WILD but man I fall right the hell asleep. I've been super tired on waking up and have only been pulling out fragments for the most part. I have been working on saegous' reverse reality checks on an hourly basis.

I do remember looknig down at my hands and saying ""I will look at my hands and remember I am dreaming". The sudden rush of realization brought me right into my body. .

I can't for the life of me remember what I was dreaming about.

Wait...I'm in my old home town. I'm driving around and looking for my father's house.


After I woke up n my body I held still for a long time thinking about doing a wild.I held still for a second and did like one or 2 mantras before rolling over and going back to sleep.

A little better. I got two fragments instead of one. I had an argument with a friend soon before bed and that's not conducive to LD. Last night I did 2 mantras. the memory one right before bed and when i woke up for wy WBTB I did 'I will look at my hands and realize I am dreaming" one. This is what i got.

Having an argument with a friend that I care about.

my daughter is singing a song to me about "a lovely juice" over and over again.

I didn't lay still when i woke up. I jumped up with a start shaking the dreams out of me. That's something i need to work on tonight when i wke up. HOLD STILL!!!

I did some wilding and was able to mantra for the most part but eventually i gave up and rolled over back to sleep. I didnt' get out of bed to WILD but i did read 10 pages of teh Robert Waggoner LD book. I need to stand up to wild.

How are you doing?

^^ Arguments are usually dream killers for me as well. My dreaming's been great all week with a couple LDs, an epic non-lucid, and just tons of recall. Last night was a reset with poor sleep and crappy vague recall, probably all due to ill-advised cups of tea during the afternoon and evening (I'm very sensitive to caffeine).

Keep up the good work!

First night back in my bed and I just slept like a madman. I had 2 dreams in mind when I woke up but by the time i finished my first journal I forgot the second one. I'm sure that tonight is then night. I'm back on home territory and I can work with what I'm doing to really pay attention to my world. I saw what frying man said about how it's better to just do the RCs on your own without the alarm , so I am stopping the alarms to work on remembering to do the RCs myself.

At a house party talking to someone abut playing elder scrolls online. I tell them about how i like to kill dragons by climbing mountains and finding where they nest. Then I just slaughter entire families. They are a little horrified and tell me that the dragons are both sentient intelligent creatures but also endangered. I am worried about the environmental impact of losing the dragons.

My current lucid goals are as follows.
1. To have a conversation with a DC and get them to sing a song with me
2. To find something to eat and see how it tastes.
3. To open a portal to another world

Stability is back and I'm on my way!

Hi Tony,

I was catching up on your posts and noticed some dreams with seemingly heightened awareness and memory when a few additional aids might have pushed you over the threshold into lucidity:

Originally Posted by tblanco

...i wonder what am i awacthing.

Originally Posted by tblanco

...Remember i don't know how to program.

WBTB is good for heightened awareness as I am sure you know and regular RC's. It sounded like you got rid of the alarm reminders which I agree are a crutch. Are you able to get a good number of RC's in without the alarm? It took me a while using truly random alarms before I was able to do fairly frequent RC's without the reminder. If I am slacking I still go back to it and I like to change up the alarm sound to something I'm not used to and something that sounds a little dreamy.

My most common RC lately is really thinking "wow, any moment could be a dream" (I can sometimes become fascinated by some aspect of my surroundings and start thinking about what I would do if dreaming, look at my hands a few times + maybe another RC). It is always great to follow up with "The next time I am dreaming I will (RC) and realize I am dreaming!"

Edit: Regarding one dream forgotten while writing down the first one. You might want to try writing down a few key words if not one sentence summaries for each dream before writing out the whole dreams so that you retain as many dreams as you want to.

Date: Tuesday July 7 2015, 5:18 AM
Important: Yes

wild
Big day for day work! Last day of vacation and I'm at home. I'm working on the RC + Sageous' Unreality checks a couple of times an hour. Studying some Leberge and Sageous yesterday and getting to bed super early with a Meditation session right before bed.

bed at 10:30, wake up at 3:30. I almost didn't get up but then i finally did. Let the dogs out to go pee and wandered around the back yard looking at the sky and thinking about dreaming.I took a "Lucid dreaming" supplement from Dreamimins. (galantamine + Choline) I lay still. I stretch my hands, arms, legs, chest, back and face. then i hhold still and repeat the classic Carlos Casteneda mantra. "The next time I am dreaming I will look at my hands and realize I am dreaming. I hear lots of noise. Rushing wind, people talking. I'm thinking about getting up to see what all the commotion is then I remember that I'm WILDing and remember that I'm dreaming.

I'm in a dark room with no light source but a lamp. I'm carrying it around shining it on things. I think that because I'm dreaming I should be able to make light appear.
I try to find a light switch but when i find one, it doesn't work.
i think about how i have that old schema that light switches don't work from "Waking Life".
i find a door and imagine what I want on the other side. I remember how one of my goals is to have a conversation with a DC. I walk through the door
then the lights come on.
I'm in a big room with super tall columns. There's an elegant cocktail party going on.
I am looking at hands, the fingerprints are deepening and darkening and crawling all over my hands in crazy patterns.

I see a pretty indian woman in a black cocktail dress and my sex drive takes over, I walk up to her and started kissing her. I put my arm around her. She's pulling away. I ask what she thinks, not interested, gives me a disgusted look, she leaves and i'm a little annoyed. The dream starts to destabilize so I Look at my hands.

looking at my hand and seeing henna tattoos patterns all over them. I find another door and want to go outside.

make it outside and it's very bright and very green. Lots of grass and a few small buildings.
I try to fly and make a high jump and fall to earth.
I see a building like some kind of fancy shed and use that as a jump off point.
I Jump to the top of the building and fly into space.
I'm looking around at the stars and I see the death star. This is super cool.
I try to fly to it but I'm stuck
I remember the Waggoner technique of thinking myself there so I try to pinch zoom it closer with both hands. Instead of it coming closer the whole sky expands into an industrial death-star landscape. I see smoking red fires and and explosions. This causes a heart rush and I lose the dream.

Dield
I'm walking around in a dark house with lots of hallways and i see people walking around.
I see an old friend but he's now in a wheelchair. I remember that one of my goals is to have a conversation with a dream character. I ask him how he's doing but he won't look me in the eye. His brother walks up to me.
I ask how he's doing.
he tells me that we are friends now and that his brother is happy but distant.
dream goes black

I start spinning. It's like 2001 with the colors shooting all around me.
I am in a very gothic house. There are mer-people flopping all over the place.
they are disgusting. There is a hot meryl streep mer lady laying on the couch. I tell her hi. A big ugly mer monster man, slimy and sweaty, jumps down from a door frame and attacks me.
I wake up.